Fred Figglehorn
The squealing, sped-up voice that ruled early YouTube and echoed off every playground. Fred Figglehorn — teenager Lucas Cruikshank's hyperactive six-year-old alter ego — turned pitch-shifted freakouts into the platform's first million-subscriber empire, and kids either quoted him constantly or begged them to stop.
Fred was created by teenager Lucas Cruikshank, who had been testing characters on a YouTube channel he shared with his cousins before uploading "Fred on Halloween" on October 30, 2006. The premise was chaos in miniature: Fred Figglehorn, a hyperactive six-year-old with a chipmunk screech achieved by speeding up the footage, ranting at the camera about his chaotic home life. The episodes were cheap, frantic, and instantly imitable — every elementary school had at least one kid doing the voice.
Once the videos moved to their own FRED channel in 2008, the character became a genuine phenomenon: by April 2009 it was the first YouTube channel ever to pass one million subscribers, a milestone that made mainstream media take web video stars seriously. Nickelodeon came calling, and Fred: The Movie premiered on the network on September 18, 2010, followed by two more films and a 2012 series, Fred: The Show. The TV run was widely panned, Cruikshank and Nickelodeon parted ways, and the character was retired — but for a stretch of the late 2000s, that shriek WAS YouTube.
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